Jennifer spent an entire day landscaping her backyard in Sunnyvale two months ago. She worked on the new grass, planted vegetables and flowers, and even spent a little time in the chicken coop. At one point, to keep her wedding and engagement rings clean, she rolled them up in her shirt. Unfortunately, she forgot they were there, and by the time she did remember, they were gone.

Jennifer and her family searched the yard immediately. The next day, she found the wedding band on the patio next to the grass. Jennifer was pretty sure the matching engagement ring would be nearby, but despite searching very hard they could not find it.

Yesterday, when Jennifer told her husband that she couldn’t find a replacement ring she liked, he suggested, “Why don’t you search the internet for someone with a metal detector.” She typed Ring Finder into Google, and sent me an email a few minutes later.

I made it to Jennifer’s house this morning with my metal detector. Her landscaping is beautiful, with a large vegetable garden and even larger chicken coop in the back, plus several other planter beds. Unfortunately, these areas would be very hard to search, because the plants get in the way of the metal detector, and the fencing, planting boxes and trellises all contained a lot of metal. But Jennifer still felt that the missing ring would be somewhere in the grass, so that’s where I began the search.

Jennifer had done a great job with the new lawn, because it was thick and healthy. Unfortunately, when I tested her wedding band, I was only able to detect it reliably out to about three inches, so the thick grass also made the search more difficult. So I patiently dragged the coil of my detector directly across the blades, keeping it as close as possible to the soil.

For the first hour, all I found was construction nails and two aluminum pull tabs, which had very similar signals to the wedding band. Then a third similar signal appeared, shallower than the rest. My pinointer said it was on the surface of the soil, but I couldn’t see anything through the grass. After almost a minute of plucking through the grass and roots, I found the engagement ring buried just under the surface. It’s a beautiful ring, and a perfect match to the wedding band.